The After The Bar Closes Fun

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I guess I should have expected it. We do live in North Carolina, Buckle of the Bible Belt. (I just coined that, if you use it I expect royalties!)

Rev. Mike Turner, of the First Baptist Church here in town eulogizes Falwell in the Daily News.

From the article:

Whether Catholic or Baptist or something in between, many people – maybe more than we’ll ever know – admired and followed the fundamentalist preacher from Lynchburg, Va. Over the last 30 years, Falwell’s was the nation’s loudest voice for traditional values. On issues like abortion, homosexuality and church-state relations, the news media invariably sought him out to speak for the conservative Christian perspective. And Falwell never let them down; he had an opinion on everything.

Well, that’s all pretty true. Millions of Americans did indeed admire and follow Falwell and his teachings. I suspect the good reverend and I will disagree on whether Falwell’s influence was a positive one for the country.

Turner continues the thought with the next paragraph.

Even his missteps – and there were many, from the fiasco surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their PTL ministries to his lawsuit against Larry Flynt and “Hustler” magazine – didn’t in the end diminish the scope of his influence or the scale of his achievements.

“Missteps”? While the examples given by Turner might indeed be categorized as missteps, allow me to present some of Falwell’s more egregious “missteps”, ones for which he more likely to be remembered, and quite deservedly so:

I meant to point this out, but it was during the hiatus so I forgot. I’m blaming age and the pain meds as my cop-out.

Each year without fail, my wife and daughter participate in the local Relay For Life. It’s a 24 hour walk-a-thon to raise money for the American Cancer Society.

The Jacksonville Daily News spoke to Kayla for their feature article on the Relay this year.

Kayla was devastated when her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. Kayla, a White Oak High School sophomore who was in middle school at the time, remembers trying to stay strong. She couldn’t see her grandma often because of the distance. Kayla lived in Pennsylvania, her grandmother lived in Kentucky. And soon after the diagnosis, Kayla and her family moved to Jacksonville.

I met a lovely young lady just before Halloween in 1987. We got along famously, and we were married before Thanksgiving. Probably not the brightest idea I’ve ever had I admit, but I was twenty and twenty year old boys aren’t always very wise.

Nevertheless, we did OK, and had a little girl in ’91 and a little boy in ’94. By the time he was a few months old, we were constantly fighting, and all miserable.

We split in April of ’95, and agreed not to fight any more over the past for the kids’ sake. Anytime the conversation steered toward the sore spots, one of us managed to steer it away. It wasn’t always easy.

We turned out to be much better friends than we were husband and wife, and by the time our divorce hearing came up, we had settled everything ourselves and showed up at the courthouse sans attorneys and holding hands.

The magistrate saw our hesitation as we pondered the plaintiff’s and defendant’s tables and helped, “You can sit together, if you want.”

She asked us a bunch of questions about our marriage, and about why we wanted to get a divorce, and when we were done, just before she banged the gavel she said to us, “Y’know, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and you’re the first two adults I’ve ever divorced.”

Anyways, long ’bout ’02 we decided we kinda liked each other and she (the ex-wife, not the magistrate…just to clarify) and the kids moved in with me. Now we’re approaching our second anniversary of our second marriage to each other, and I gotta tell ya’- divorce was the best thing we ever did for each other or for the kids, statistics be damned.

Sometimes there are things I want to address, but outside the context of UDoJ. I’ve been thinking about setting up a separate blog for that.

Here it is.

First of all, I was going to say that I’m the author of U Dream Of Janie and Kissing Corporal Kate. But the truth is the girls have taken on such a life of their own that I’m really just the secretary that takes dictation.

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